The world knew Tina Turner as a force of nature — the legs, the voice, the hair, the survivor who came back bigger than ever. But the woman behind the legend was shaped by quieter things: a chant she whispered to herself in the darkest years, a love that arrived when she had stopped looking for it, and a family she loved fiercely even when loving them broke her heart. This is the story of Anna Mae Bullock’s heart — the part of Tina Turner the stage lights never quite reached.
The Chant That Saved Her Life
In 1973, in the middle of a marriage that was destroying her, Tina Turner was introduced to a practice that would sustain her for the next fifty years. It happened at Bolic Sound, Ike Turner’s recording studio in Los Angeles, where a woman named Valerie Bishop — who worked at the studio — told her about Nichiren Buddhism and taught her the chant: “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” devotion to the mystic law of the Lotus Sutra.
Tina had been raised Baptist in Nutbush, Tennessee. She had tried everything else. She had even attempted suicide, overdosing on Valium in a moment of despair. But something about the chant reached her. She later wrote that from chanting, she could feel herself becoming stronger — becoming less and less afraid of Ike. “Buddhism literally saved my life,” she told an interviewer in 2020, describing the turning point that came shortly after her suicide attempt. “I started seeing my life — I started really seeing that I had to make a change.”
She chanted every day for the rest of her life. She chanted on national television — famously, on Larry King’s CNN show in 1997, unembarrassed and radiant. After she retired from touring, she recorded her practice for the album “Beyond: Buddhist & Christian Prayers” in 2009, an interfaith project made with the Swiss-Tibetan singer Dechen Shak-Dagsay. And in 2020, she published “Happiness Becomes You,” a spiritual memoir about what five decades of chanting had taught her. The girl from the Baptist church in Nutbush had found her own road to the divine — and it carried her all the way out of hell.
The Man at the Airport
By the mid-1980s, Tina Turner had every reason to be done with love. Her marriage to Ike had been sixteen years of abuse. She had rebuilt her career alone. She was, by her own admission, resigned to living without romance. And then, at an airport in Germany, a young music executive from EMI was sent to pick her up before a concert.
His name was Erwin Bach. He was sixteen years younger than her — quiet, relaxed, unpretentious, everything Ike had not been. Tina later described it as love at first sight: an immediate emotional connection with a man who wanted nothing from her except her company. They started dating. They kept dating. For twenty-seven years.
It was the great love story of her life, conducted almost entirely out of the spotlight. They shared a home in Cologne in the early 1990s, then moved to Switzerland in 1995, settling into a lakeside estate in Küsnacht outside Zurich. Erwin never tried to manage her, never tried to own her, never tried to be anything but her partner. After everything she had survived, Tina Turner had finally found what she called the kind of love she had always deserved — the kind that arrives when you least expect it, and stays.
The Wedding and the Stroke
In 2013, after more than a quarter-century together, Tina and Erwin finally married at their Swiss estate, surrounded by friends and a garden full of roses. She was seventy-three. He was fifty-seven. It should have been the beginning of a long, peaceful coda.
Three weeks later, she had a stroke.
Turner didn’t grasp the severity of what was happening — she tried to leave the doctor’s office — and the road back was brutal. She had to learn how to walk again. The woman who had danced across the world’s biggest stages had to teach her body its most basic movements, one painful step at a time. Erwin was there for all of it, steady and devoted, the way he had been for decades.
The stroke was only the beginning of a cascade of health crises. In 2016, doctors diagnosed her with intestinal cancer; part of her intestine was removed, and she began grueling treatment. Her kidneys, damaged by years of high blood pressure, were failing — by December 2016, they were functioning at twenty percent and dropping fast. She faced a choice between regular dialysis and a transplant, and the chances of finding a donor kidney seemed remote. In her darkest moment, she signed up with Exit, the Swiss assisted-suicide organization, and began making arrangements to end her life.
The Kidney
What happened next is one of the great love stories in the history of popular music — and it happened entirely in private. As Tina was preparing to die, Erwin Bach did something extraordinary. “He said he didn’t want another woman, or another life,” she later wrote. “Then he shocked me. He said he wanted to give me one of his kidneys.”
They underwent compatibility tests. Despite Tina being a high-risk patient — her heart damaged by years of hypertension — the transplant went ahead on April 7, 2017. Erwin recovered fully. Tina faced months of heavy immunosuppressants, dizziness, and the constant, low-grade fear of rejection that follows every transplant patient. But she lived. The man she had met at an airport thirty years earlier had literally given her a piece of himself so she could keep going.
She never took it for granted. In the years that followed, Turner became an advocate for kidney health, writing an open letter about her experience and urging people to take their own kidney function seriously. “From time to time my body tried to reject the donor kidney, as it frequently happens after transplantation,” she wrote honestly. But she was alive — alive to see her musical open on Broadway, alive to tell her story in the documentary “Tina,” alive because the quiet man from EMI had loved her enough to open his own body.
The Saddest Moment as a Mother
For all the joy Erwin brought her, Tina Turner’s life as a mother was marked by devastating loss. She had four sons: Craig, her eldest, born in 1958 when she was just eighteen, with Raymond Hill, a saxophonist in the Kings of Rhythm; Ronnie, born in 1960, her only biological child with Ike Turner; and Ike Jr. and Michael, Ike’s sons from a previous relationship, whom she adopted and raised as her own.
In July 2018, Craig — who had grown up to be a Beverly Hills real estate agent, living a quiet life far from the spotlight — died by suicide at his home in Studio City, California. He was fifty-nine. Tina called it “the saddest moment as a mother.” She scattered his ashes off the coast of California, and wrote that he would always be her baby. The woman who had survived everything could not protect her firstborn from his own despair, and the grief nearly broke her.
She had barely begun to heal when tragedy struck again. In December 2022, her younger son Ronnie died at sixty-two from complications of colon cancer, found struggling to breathe outside his home in Encino. Tina’s tribute on Instagram was heartbreaking in its simplicity: “Ronnie, you left the world far too early. In sorrow I close my eyes and think of you, my beloved son.” Within six months, Tina herself would be gone — as if, having buried two of her children, her own heart had finally decided it had carried enough.
The Quiet Years in Küsnacht
Through all the health battles, Tina and Erwin’s life together in Küsnacht was remarkably ordinary — and that was the point. Their lakeside estate, which she called Château Algonquin, was her sanctuary: gardens, views of Lake Zurich, and blessed quiet. In 2013, she became a Swiss citizen, formally closing the book on her American life. The girl from Nutbush was now, officially, Swiss.
She gardened. She read. She chanted. She received the occasional visitor — Oprah Winfrey, who watched Erwin care for Tina through the medical crises and marveled at his devotion. She stayed out of the spotlight with a discipline that would have impressed Greta Garbo, emerging only for projects that mattered to her: the “Tina” musical, which opened on Broadway in 2019, and the HBO documentary “Tina” in 2021, in which she seemed to be saying a gentle goodbye to her fans.
It was the life she had never been allowed to have in her youth: peaceful, private, and entirely her own. No one was hitting her. No one was stealing her money. No one was telling her who to be. There was just Erwin, the lake, the garden, and the chant. After everything, it was enough. It was more than enough.
The Last Bow
Tina Turner died on May 24, 2023, at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. She was eighty-three. Her beloved Erwin was at her side — the man from the airport, the kidney donor, the quiet constant of nearly four decades. The tributes poured in from every corner of music, but the most telling came from the generations of women who had grown up watching her: Beyoncé, Rihanna, Adele, and countless others who understood that she hadn’t just survived, but had shown them how.
She had lived long enough to see her life become a Broadway musical, a documentary, a legend. She had found love, lost children, beaten cancer, learned to walk again, and chanted her way through all of it. The girl from Nutbush who had nothing — not even her own name — had become one of the most beloved figures in the history of popular music, and she had done it on her own terms.
What remains of Tina Turner isn’t just the voice, or the legs, or the records. It’s the chant — “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” — whispered by a terrified woman in the 1970s who decided she was done being afraid. It’s the kidney, given freely by a man who loved her enough to open his own body. It’s the ashes scattered off the California coast, and the Instagram post that said “you left the world far too early.” The Queen of Rock and Roll was a warrior, yes. But warriors are made, not born — and Tina Turner was made, day by day, out of faith, out of love, and out of a heart that refused, against every odd, to stop beating. What’s love got to do with it? Everything. It always did.
Leave a Reply